(March 6, 2014 at 10:16 pm)Wyrd of Gawd Wrote: According to the fairy tale the 144,000 are supposed to be special Jews. So how did JWs get to be special Jews?The JWs claim that the modern-day True Christian™ congregation is a "spiritual Israel." So in that sense, they're as special as special gets. I figure they probably just handwave the "Jews" part of that.
They claim that they're part of an unbroken line of such true Christians dating back to Jesus' time, but I don't ever recall hearing an explanation for how that managed to happen without running out of slots for the 144,000 positions in heaven. According to the JWs, the heavenly calling was completed in 1935 and only then did the earthly calling begin. As far as I know, there are still around 9,000 of the heaven-bound on Earth, so over the past 2,000-ish years, there were only 135,000 people who managed to stay on god's good side.
I understand that a few years ago they became less circumspect with regard to who partakes of the wine and crackers at the memorial (their version of mass, performed only once a year-- the only religious day they observe). After that, the number of those claiming to hear a heavenly calling has increased steadily. I suspect it's a bit of a sore point for the organization that the number of people who are still being called to heaven continues to grow almost 80 years after god stopped accepting applications.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
